Archive for the ‘ Education ’ Category

The National Digital Library

You can find it easily enough at dp.la. Your browser should add all the rest of the stuff to the URL for you.

You can read about it in the New York Review at The National Digital Public Library Is Launched! The article is only two pages long – and is well-worth reading.

This effort is pure altruism – that the Internet made possible – much like Wikipedia. Americans can be proud of themselves – but most will probably ignore it entirely – since it won’t make any money for them.

From the article:

Speaking broadly, the DPLA represents the confluence of two currents that have shaped American civilization: utopianism and pragmatism. The utopian tendency marked the Republic at its birth, for the United States was produced by a revolution, and revolutions release utopian energy—that is, the conviction that the way things are is not the way they have to be. When things fall apart, violently and by collective action, they create the possibility of putting them back together in a new manner, according to higher principles.

The American revolutionaries drew their inspiration from the Enlightenment—and from other sources, too, including unorthodox varieties of religious experience and bloody-minded convictions about their birthright as free-born Englishmen. Take these ingredients, mix well, and you get the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights—radical assertions of principle that would never make it through Congress today.

What the article does not go into is something very important – copyright laws. These badly need to be updated for our information (or knowledge) economy. These have been extended back in time endlessly – for no good reason. They should be limited to the usual life of any printed material – only a few years.

Copyright law also needs to be extended to allow books to be rented from any digital library. The technology for this is available and is being used in places like Amazon’s Kindle where you can rent any book for any time you chose. This should be extended to all books. Publishers would have to allow this, whether they want to or not. And eventually all nations would have to agree with this – just as they do the existing copyright laws.

The difficulty is the many proprietary formats for electronic books. Everybody wants to force everyone else to use their format. With no thought at all to the common good – which is considered a ridiculous idea.

The problem, in the last analysis, is much larger – we should be in control of our world – but we are not – and don’t want to be.

2013
04/20
CATEGORY
Education
Internet
Software
Technology
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Civilization and its Discontents

Wesleyan University online lecture

“People no longer read, they watch movies.”

I have said this over and over – and I am convinced that this is true to a large extent.

But is also true that they stubbornly refuse to know (or learn) anything at all. Here is an excellent lecture that lasts nine minutes and costs nothing. But most people would not touch it with a ten-foot pole.

Thousands of people take these courses – but they are a drop in the bucket compared to the millions who do not.

2013
03/28
CATEGORY
Education
Philosophy
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How to Not See What is Really Going On

I am still reading about Social Entrepreneurship – and I have two conflicting feelings about it. First, I really enjoy reading about all the entrepreneurs, what they are doing – and how they are doing it. Doing things right is tremendously exciting for me – and is one of my main motivators.

But at the same time I have a lifetime of experience where I have been shown over and over that most people have just the opposite motivation – they insist on doing things wrong. And they insist on not noticing this at all.

The solution for the Social Entrepreneurship crowd is simple – find people who can do things right and support them so they can fix our problems.  Once this assumption is put into words however (something they cleverly avoid doing) - huge problems raise their ugly heads.

The most basic one seems to be that our present huge, complex, technical society requires management skills far in excess of those we have. Finding specialists who can do this for us is not the solution. For a number of reasons I need not go into here.

You may say that what needs to be done is to educate everyone properly – so they acquire these skills. And there is lot to be said for this approach. A good liberal education is indeed valuable – as I said in Why Liberal Education Matters. But as any good educator knows, there is only so much they can do. You can take a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink.

The horse (our present global society) will not do what is required of it – mainly become aware of where it is. This it absolutely will not do.

And not only that, our smart guys (who should know what is going on) have no idea how they got that way. They can only look on in astonishment as the mass mess things up.

And nobody, and I mean nobody, will admit things are in such a sorry state they cannot be fixed. Since I can see this – and I am not too bright – it puzzles me why other people cannot too.

To put this another way – we have come up with all kinds of clever ways of fixing our small problems. But have overlooked our Big Problem. Anything that does not look this in the face is merely a distraction.

2013
03/04
CATEGORY
Education
Negative being
Philosophy
1 comment

Why Liberal Education Matters

Inside Higher Ed

I am taking a MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) called The Modern and the Postmodern provided by Wesleyan University. It is taught by the President, Michael S. Roth.

He recently went to Peking University to talk to them about Liberal Education. And, somewhat to his surprise, they were responsive to his message. Like the US, their education has become too practical and limited.

I was a victim of this myself. Instead of finding out what I wanted to do – I did what I was told and became an engineer. Something I didn’t really want to be.

I liked this part of his talk especially:

We need not just new apps to play with, but new strategies for dealing with fundamental economic, ecological and social problems. Only by creatively challenging the prevailing consensus do we have a chance of addressing these threats to our future.

We already have one of these multi-purpose, multi-use applications – the blog, such as the one I am using here. It’s not changing the world – indeed it is mostly adding more junk to the cloud. But it is keeping me alive.

But – much more importantly – I must add that there are plenty of people who got what was billed as a liberal education - but who learned nothing at all.

And even more strangely – they have never noticed this. And just went on with their lives as though they had never been educated in the first place.

2013
03/02
CATEGORY
Education
Technology
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The Modern and the Postmodern

Coursera

Coursera now has 90 new classes and 29 new schools. These are all MOOC (Massively Open Online Courses) and all are free.

If you (like me) like learning – now is the perfect time to do it!

Watch the video – it’s free too.

2013
02/22
CATEGORY
Education
History
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What is This Doing to Us?

Technology Is Changing How Students Learn, Teachers Say

This is a question we should have asked ourselves long ago, but didn’t. Instead we asked ourselves “What can this do for us?” And the answer was always “It can make us rich and powerful!” And so we went for a whole line of new technologies – the sailing ship, the railroad, the automobile. Never dreaming they would deplete our inner selves – that as we put more of ourselves into them, there would be less of us.

Even as I write this, I find it hard to believe – and I have to struggle to find the words to express myself. This was a question our technology-obsessed culture forbid us to ask. “Things were getting better and better,” we were told, and questions like this would ruin everything.

But then the ultimate disaster hit us – networked technologies, the radio, television, and now the Computer. Before we had something physical to identify with – now we have something that is all over the place – everywhere and nowhere at the same time. But something that exercises an enormous influence on us – one that we cannot resist.

In response, we did the only thing we could do – we ceased to exist. At least consciously, and retreated into our collective unconsciousness. Which we are not aware of (by definition).

We may not be aware of it – but powerful people have made it their business to be aware of it, and have learned to how to manipulate it. As a result, they now control us.

This is the most horrible condition imaginable. But once again, we made what seemed to be the only response available – we ignored this, and became what they wanted us to be: satisfied, happy consumers. With no minds at all.

All of this: the whole rant I just went through, is not something anyone with a job – schoolteachers and psychologists, for example, can recognize and keep his job. Even people who do not have jobs – but depend on the general public for their support and approval – cannot cross this line. Let me amplify on that.

When I was working in Silicon Valley I met this psychologist who had made a new discovery – the Highly-Sensitive Person (she was one of them herself). So she went to work and wrote a book about it.

But her publisher would not accept it unless parts of it that were critical of American culture were deleted. “People wouldn’t like that,” he said, and would not budge one inch from that position. She was getting desperate to get her book published, and accepted the deletions.

The book was a success, and made her famous. But also made her know (unconsciously) that she would have to forget part of her discovery to make it acceptable. Which she did – without realizing it.

Meanwhile, I was fast becoming critical of The System – which made me unemployable. I got kicked out of the nest and ended up down here.

I now have time to reflect on this question – and write about my discoveries. It’s not a bad life. I live in interesting times and there is plenty to write about.

2012
11/03
CATEGORY
Education
Psychology
Sociology
Technology
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The Generation Gap

This posting is the result of many influences: my online course on Model Thinking, an article on the Chicago Teachers Strike – and reflections of my own on the vast difference between the way education was viewed in my parent’s time and way it is viewed by parents today.

My mother was a rural school teacher back in the Twenties, and she loved it. Not because she had any innate love of learning, but because of the respect and independence that she had. She taught in a one-room school house, where she taught all the grades at the same time, and she boarded with the families of her pupils – which meant she got to know them, and they got to know her. During recesses during the winter, she went sled-riding with her pupils.

The parents wanted their children to be educated because that would help them get ahead. And their children’s future was their future. And everyone assumed that future would be bright.

I did not have the benefit of a one-room schoolhouse. The schools had become consolidated and run by a hierarchical bureaucracy not interested in education and by teachers who were not interested in the students. But we were expected to go to college, and have a career – and we did. I worked my way through college, as did many others. This was the age of the dysfunctional family, and we all suffered from it.

I can hardly believe what I see going on in my sibling’s children (I have no children of my own). A few went to college because their father was paying for it – but only went to have fun, and never used their education in any way. But most dropped out of college early – or did not go at all.

The parents do not assume that their children’s future is their future. There is no continuity at all. And the children can only be described as losers. And the future is bleak.

And no one notices anything.

2012
09/14
CATEGORY
Education
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Johann Pestalozzi

What follows is a direct lift from the book Not for Profit, the subject of my posting Not For Profit.

Beginning on page 58:
—
Swiss Educator Johann Pestalozzi (1746-1827) took as his target the practice of rote learning and force-feeding, ubiquitous in schools of his day. The purpose of this sort of education, as he portrays it, was the creation of docile citizens who, as grownups, would follow authority and not ask questions. In his copious writings on education, some of them in fictional form, Prestalozzi describes, by contrast, an education aimed at rendering the child active and inquisitive through the development of his or her natural critical capacities. He presents the Socratic type of education as an engaging and enlivening, and as just plain common sense – if the goal is to train the mind, and not to produce herdlike obedience.

Prestalozzzi’s was not a narrow Socratism – he also gave significance, in education, to sympathy and affection. His idea figure was a maternal figure, as well as a Socratic challenger. He was ahead of his era in urging a complete ban on corporal punishment, and he emphasized the importance of play in early education…

In the influencial novel Leonard and Gertrude (1781), Prestalozzi describes the reform of education in a small town, from an elite sort of indoctrination to a highly participatory and democratic form of mental awakening. Significantly, the agent of the radical change is a working-class woman, Gertrude, who exemplifies the maternal, the inquisitive, and the down-to-earth, all in one. In her village school, she educates boys and girls from all social classes, treating them as equals and teaching them useful practical skills…

Gertrude is also affectionate and interested in cultivating the children’s emotional  capacities along with their capacity for criticism. In the 1801 book How Gertrude Teaches Her Children, Pestalozzi summarizes the principles of good schooling, making it clear that family love is the source and the animating principle of all true education…

Pestalozzi was too radical for his time and place; the various schools he started were all failures, and Napoleon, whom he approached, refused to take an interest in his ideas.

2012
08/25
CATEGORY
Education
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Modern & Contemporary American Poetry

https://www.coursera.org/course/modernpoetry

There are people who still like poetry, including yours truly. Check out the video by the instructor. This guy is talking to you personally.

Coursera is a big part of the new online educational scene. It’s courses have been mostly technical, but it is getting more into the humanities – as you can see at https://www.coursera.org/

2012
08/24
CATEGORY
Education
Poetry
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Not For Profit

This is the title of a new book I just got. Its full title is Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, by Martha C. Nussbaum.

She has the strange idea that people are important – when of course they are not. They should be, but they are not. And I would tackle the subject from that viewpoint. But she takes a different tack.

Here are the two quotes from the first chapter The Silent Crisis:

Education is that process by which thought is opened out of the soul, and, associated with outward things, is reflected back on itself, and this made conscious of their reality and shape.

Bronson Alcott, Massachusetts educator, c. 1850

While making use of material possessions, man has to be careful to protect himself from their tyranny. If he is weak enough to grow smaller to fit himself to his covering, then it becomes a process of gradual suicide by shrinkage of the soul.

Rabindranath Tagore, Indian educator, c. 1917

Ms. Nussbaum is an educator – in spades. From the back cover:

Historically, the humanities have been central to education because they have been seen as essential for creating competent democratic citizens. But recently, Nussbaum argues, thinking about the aims of education has gone disturbingly awry in the United States and abroad.

We increasingly treat education as thought is primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable and empathetic citizens.

This shortsighted focus on profitable skills has eroded our ability to criticize authority, reduced our sympathy for the marginalized and different, and damaged our competence to deal with complex global problems.

Few will disagree, at least openly. But if you look below their covering, as Tagore calls it, you will see a profound hostility towards anything human.

In this quote, she starts to get downright nasty:

But educators for economic growth will do more the ignore the arts. They will fear them. For a cultivated and developed sympathy is a particularly dangerous enemy of obtuseness, and moral obtuseness is necessary to carry out programs of economic development that ignore inequality.

Equality is a subject where even I fear to tread; it is a minefield, waiting for the tread of careless feet. But for that reason, we should pick our way carefully through it. But that means we have to think, which Americans refuse to do.

Would a better education help? Of course – if it is better. Good teachers are extremely important, and ought to be amply rewarded. But good parents (ones that support good schools) are even more important.

And these are in extremely short supply.

2012
08/24
CATEGORY
Business
Economy
Education
1 comment
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